 Courtesy of Princeton University Libraries, Princeton, N.J. |
 Valentine Bargmann April 6, 1908 — July 20, 1989 By John R. Klauder |
| BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS | National Academy of Sciences |
Courtesy of Princeton University Libraries, Princeton, N.J. |
Valentine Bargmann April 6, 1908 — July 20, 1989 By John R. Klauder |
"LET'S ASK BARGMANN!" with that phrase--addressed to me by my Princeton thesis advisor--I was led to my first real encounter with Valentine Bargmann. Our question pertained to a mathematical fine point dealing with quantum mechanical Hamiltonians expressed as differential operators, and we got a prompt, clear, and definitive answer. Valya--the common nickname for Valentine Bargmann--was already an established and justly renowned mathematical physicist in the best sense of the term, and his advice was widely sought by beginners and experts alike. It was, of course, a thorough preparation that brought Valya to his well-deserved reputation.
Valya Bargmann was born on April 6, 1908, in Berlin, and studied at the University of Berlin from 1925 to 1933. As National Socialism began to grow in Germany, he moved to Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Zürich under the guidance of Gregor Wentzel. Soon thereafter he emigrated to the United States. It is noteworthy that his passport, which would have been revoked in Germany at that time, had but two days left to its validity when he was accepted for immigration into the United States. He soon joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in time was accepted as an assistant to Albert Einstein.
Along with Peter Bergmann, Bargmann analyzed five-dimensional theories combining gravity and electromagnetism at a classical level. During World War II, Bargmann worked on shock wave studies with John von Neumann and on the inversion of matrices of large dimension with von Neumann and Deane Montgomery. Bargmann taught informally at Princeton beginning in 1941. He received a regular appointment as a lecturer in physics in 1946 and remained at Princeton essentially for the rest of his career.
Bargmann worked with Eugene Wigner on relativistic wave equations and together they developed the justly famous Bargmann-Wigner equations for elementary particles of arbitrary spin. In 1978 Bargmann and Wigner jointly received the first Wigner Medal, an award of the Group Theory and Fundamental Physics Foundation. Besides this honor, Bargmann was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1979 and won the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 1988.
Valya was a gentle and modest person--and he was a talented pianist. At social occasions it was not uncommon for Valya to perform solo or accompany other musicians.
His lectures were renowned for their clarity and polish. Among the prized series of lectures were those on his acknowledged specialties, such as group theory (e.g., the Lorentz group and its representations, and ray representations of Lie groups), as well as second quantization. In mathematics, his most influential work was on the irreducible representations of the Lorentz group. This work has served as a paradigm for representation theory ever since its appearance. Bargmann also made important contributions to several aspects of quantum theory. He was a stellar example of the European tradition in mathematical physics in the spirit of Hermann Weyl, von Neumann, and Wigner. A book in Bargmann's honor offers expert comments on a number of topics dear to the heart of Valya.1
Bargmann had his less serious side as well. No better example of that can be given than the story told by Gérard G. Emch, who arrived at Princeton in 1964 to begin a postdoctoral year with Valya. Emch also arrived with a newly minted "theorem," which he proudly presented to the master. No sooner had the theorem been laid out than Bargmann was ready with a counterexample. Sorely disappointed, Emch retreated for home that day and continued to study the matter. At 3 a.m. Emch's phone range. The caller, Bargmann, heartily laughed when Emch quickly picked up the phone. He then said, "I thought you would still be up. Go to bed and get some sleep. I have found an error in my counter-example. We can discuss it tomorrow!"
Valya Bargmann published a modest number of papers by contemporary standards, but he nevertheless was instrumental in opening several distinct fields of investigation. His paper on establishing a limit on the number of bound states to which an attractive quantum mechanical potential may lead has spawned a minor industry in the research on such issues. His paper dealing with distinct potentials that exhibit identical scattering phase shifts redirected research in inverse scattering theory in which it had been previously assumed that the scattering phase shifts would uniquely characterize the potential. His study of the unitary irreducible representations of the noncompact group SL(2,R) have proved not only invaluable in their own right but have served as a model of how such representations are to be sought for more general noncompact Lie groups. Shortly after completing the work on SL(2,R) he also completed a manuscript on the related group SL(2,C). This work, however, was never published because independent work by Israel Gel'fand and Mark Naimark covering the same ground reached the publisher ahead of Bargmann's planned submission.
To a large extent, Bargmann tended to write either short notes or long, extensive articles. When he felt he really had something to say it seems he would become didactic, thorough, and complete. Thus, his papers on SL(2,R) and the factor representation of groups were both long papers by Bargmann's standards. However, he saved his longest and most sustained study until the 1960s, when he dealt with one of the subjects for which he will long be remembered. It is to this set of papers and a brief sketch of some of their principal novelty that I would like to turn my attention at this point. I have chosen to outline two mathematical arguments, because on the one hand they are relatively simple and on the other hand they are universal and profound.
From 1961 onward, Valya published several papers dealing with the foundations and applications of Hilbert space representations by holomorphic functions now commonly known as Bargmann spaces (or sometimes as Segal-Bargmann spaces in view of an essentially parallel analysis of the main features by Irving Segal). We can outline a few of the principal ideas in such an analysis by first starting with the following background material. The basic kinematical operators in canonical quantum mechanics for a single degree of freedom may be taken as the two Hermitian operators Q and P, which obey the fundamental Heisenberg commutation relation
Thus, the holomorphic function representation endowed with the Bargmann inner product provides an explicit integral representation for the action of an arbitrary tempered distribution, a feature entirely unavailable in the usual form of generalized functions and formal integrals.
The discussion just concluded regarding two topics dealing with holomorphic function spaces illustrates the penetrating simplicity of Bargmann's approach to mathematical physics. Would that we had more like him today; I occasionally miss the opportunity to "ask Bargmann."
THANKS ARE EXTENDED TO Gérard G. Emch, Elliott H. Lieb, Barry Simon, and Arthur S. Wightman for their input and/or comments that have found their way into this article.
| NOTE |
1 E. H. Lieb, B. Simon, and A. S. Wightman, eds. Studies in Mathematical Physics, Essays in Honor of Valentine Bargmann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.
| SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY |
| Biographical Memoirs | National Academy of Sciences |